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Spanish prosecutors Thursday advised against going forward with investigations into six former U.S. officials charged with sanctioning torture as Washington releases memos justifying the use of waterboarding. Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde Pumpido said the decision to hold back on the probe stemmed from the fact that none of the six – including former U.S. […]

I’d like to take a moment to highlight a resource from the Council on Foreign Relations that will be useful background info as you read about Obama’s trip to Mexico prior to attending the Summit of the Americas. The CFR offers a three-part timeline of the history of U.S.-Mexico relations from Mexican independence to the […]

The dramatic rescue of the Maersk Alabama’s captain Richard Phillips brought relief that his hostage crisis was resolved, but the dangers of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean continue.  Somali pirates have not been slowed by the Maersk Alabama incident, continuing to regularly hijack ships to make money by ransoming the ship, […]

Few people–let alone journalists–can get very close to the notorious gang in El Salvador, known as MS-13. Some journalists might even say, “Don’t bother trying, they won’t talk to you”. But Salvadoran journalist Christian Poveda has done just that, and what he discovered both startling and impossible to ignore. Poveda’s resulting documentary, “La Vida Loca”, […]

China’s Xinhua news service reported today that on Monday China Radio International announced that a group of dolphins prevented pirates from attacking a group of Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden. This bizarre event was minor compared to the major story coming out of Beijing today: that China’s GDP dropped significantly in the […]

    Paul Krugman, Princeton professor and New York Times Op-Ed columnist, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity. I started paying attention to Prof. Krugman’s work after his Nobel prize, including his recent book “Conscience of a Liberal”. But more accessible than his […]

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) held an event on April 8, 2009 with Professor Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.  Professor De Shutter presented an analysis of the global food crisis titled “From Malthus to Sen.”  Following his remarks, he took questions from Steven Schonberger from the World […]

If we are to talk about U.S. relations with Latin America, what springs to mind? Is it overthrowing governments? Supporting dictators? Funding death squads? That was the past and a new day has dawned, at least according to this article published by The Diplomatic Courier: A Global Affairs Magazine: The White House has said that […]

  Most communist regimes (most dictatorships for that matter) have been swept away by history, usually when they failed to deliver the goods on economic growth and social welfare.  Democracies contain elaborate rules by which the people can “throw the rascals out” when their leaders fail to deliver.  True, when enough people blame the democratic […]

The Waxman-Markey bill signals Washington’s intentions to pony up to fund deforestation prevention as part of overall climate legislation. But will climate scientists, C-15 negotiators, developing countries and environmental groups agree on an international forest protection program that everyone, including the trees, can live with? Scientists and climate policy makers now agree that saving forests […]

I was surprised to learn that the White House science advisor, John Holdren, who I have lauded here, along with most of the other Obama appointees working on energy, the environment and climate change, has said that geoengineering should not be “off the table.”  See Obama climate adviser open to geo-engineering to tackle global warming […]

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good patriotic cry.  Russians and like-minded Ukrainians are lining up these days to see a movie, “Taras Bulba,” that allows them this public pleasure while undercutting Ukraine’s separate national identity.  A real “twofer” for the movie’s sponsors, the Russian government. The NYT report on the film’s opening in […]